The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed a little change on
our cover: a new entry for something called “Contract Services.” I’m sure none of you have any idea what that covers (he said in a
highly over-exaggerated manner while rolling his eyes).

Of course you know what those are. But, for the
benefit of casual visitors who might be leafing through this issue in your reception area or in your office while waiting for you to get off a call,
we’ll mostly be talking in that section about news of contract research organizations (CROs) and contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs—or
sometimes CDMO for contract development and manufacturing organization)—basically, the firms to whom pharma and biotech companies outsource work that
is too complex, burdensome, costly or time-consuming for them to handle themselves.

We did have an Outsourcing
department at one time and then dropped it, but now the market for CRO/CMO work has changed.

CROs and CMOs are a
pretty critical part of the discovery and development of therapeutics and diagnostics. They often have the specialized systems, connections, scale, etc. to
do efficiently what pharmas and biotechs often cannot—or in some cases, the ability to synergistically boost what those companies are already doing to
make their work even more efficient and effective.

So, we felt it was high time to give them their own space in
the magazine.

This does mean some changes going forward. We haven’t eliminated any existing news sections
and have no plans to, so there might be a couple fewer news stories on other topic areas each issue. But, overall, we will tend to have slightly more news
stories than we did before.

There is another small change taking place as well. If your eagle eyes were
really sharp, you might have also noticed the lack of an entry on the cover’s table of contents for the monthly Q&As that we started
running around the time I took the DDNews helm in January 2014. There is indeed a Q&A in this issue, but going forward, it won’t be a
regular feature of the physical magazine. However, for the foreseeable future, we expect to include them as a special “online only” feature of
each issue. Don’t worry; we’ll tell you in each physical issue where to find it and what company/topic it will address.

We welcome your input about the new section as we move forward and, as always, we invite your commentary and input about the
publication and our website in general. You can find me at bouley@ddn-news.com. Thanks for your continued
readership, and I hope to be serving up the news you need (and didn’t know that you didn’t know about) for a long time to come.